Very insightful and interesting book. This one takes you through the history of Bell Labs from the very beginning to what remains of it today (although one could argue it died when AT&T broke up).

Learning about various great minds such as Bill Shockley, and Claude Shannon and getting a glimpse behind the scenes of great innovations such as the transistor was fascinating.

My particular takeaways from the novel were two in particular. The first being that I want to work alongside other great minds! This book demonstrates the advantage of putting a ton of the greatest minds all in one place, which is that they tend to generate beautiful and innovative ideas! Even ones like Claude Shannon’s Information Theory which is attributed solely to him was surely helped by having so many other great minds around him. Also observing the multidisciplinary nature of the lab and how this played a key part in the innovation of the transistor in particular inspired me to explore topics and subject I’m not experienced in such as electronics and web design.

My second major takeaway was great minds are unique minds. What I mean by this is that after reading Feynman’s bio and after reading about the lives of Shannon, Shockley, Piece, etc. I’ve learned that the greatest minds have their own ways of generating ideas and working. There’s no single formula to conducting research or working on a problem. While this is a bit obvious it was particularly important to me as it inspired me to begin exploring different ways of putting myself in positions to think more. I’ve begun going on more walks, writing down things, removing headphones/distractions from my daily life, and overall I’ve spent more time thinking everyday. I also felt some of my prior intuitions were reinforced after reading this. Things like how I tend to jump all over the place with my interests and passion projects (i.e. robots, electronics, software, finance, math, etc.) was reflected in how John Pierce jumped from different passions and interests (gliders, satellites, mobile phones, lasers, etc.). As well as my recent (2 years) resurgence in interest in reading albeit for different reasons (I read a lot of fiction as a child but now am more interested in thought-provoking material) being reflected in how Claude Shannon kept a home library which he explored and used to his heart’s content in his later years.

There’s a lot more this book showed such as how important ideas can have such humble beginnings (humble either through the humble backgrounds of all the scientists or by where the idea came from) as well as how these ideas can be manifested through chance encounters. Bell Labs was unique, and perhaps we will never have anything remotely close it again. The lessons learned from Bell Labs can be taken by many as they seek to work on important ideas in the future.

This book was definitely not what i expected and I even completely stopped reading it at some point. Once i picked it up again though I flew through it. Feynman is a very interesting guy, he comes across as quite humble and as a very eccentric personality. The stories collected in this novel are very diverse and were very entertaining, making me laugh out loud on several occasions. Will definitely come back to this in the future.

Wiener is a crank — in a good way — and is very insightful. The whole book pretty much looks at humans and the institutions set up by the western world (law, academia, capitalism, etc.) through the lens of control and information theory. As someone who learned about these subjects in school and thinks about these disciplines every day I will say his insight was very interesting. Huge recommend for anyone remotely interested in those fields. Also, his words seem quite prescient given the current focus surrounding AI safety and how his words — despite being from the 50s — echo a lot of the same concerns from modern day AI doomers (which is also alluded to in the foreword by Brian Christian in the edition I read).